George Newman strolled the shop floor inside Front Range Community College's new Advanced Technology Center looking like the proverbial kid in a candy store.

"This is a five-axis mill," Newman said, stopping in front of a huge Bridgeport GX 250 machine. "You won't see too many of these on a college campus."

The 11,230-square-foot Advanced Technology Center is the new home for FRCC's Precision Machining Program. The college resurrected the program two years ago because of the demand for machinists expressed by northern Colorado employers.

Even though the program was launched at Front Range's Boulder County Campus in Longmont, its size and scope was limited because FRCC had to train on equipment owned by the Career Development Center.

Front Range had sold off its machining equipment years ago when it dropped its original machining program.

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Thanks to a federal grant, the college now has its new facility at 2120 Miller Drive, complete with classroom space and a large production area with more than two dozen machines.

Classes in the new facility are expected to start in a few weeks.

"The new equipment that went into this facility was right around a million dollars," Newman said.

Some of the more advanced machines, such as the five-axis Bridgeport and one called a "Swiss-turn" machine, are meant to train the most advanced machinists.

"This is a very specialized lathe," Newman said. "You can think of it as a combination of lathe and mill. ... It can take, in the old days, what used to take two or three set-ups and do it in one."

An open house for the Advanced Technology Center is scheduled for 2 to 3:30 p.m. Thursday. A machining job fair is that same day, being held across the street at 2121 Miller Drive in the FRCC Community Room. The job fair is open to FRCC machining students only from 3:30 to 5 p.m., and then to anyone from 5 to 6:30 p.m.

Shortage of qualified workers

Within the new center, FRCC will be offering both credit and non-credit machining training for students, along with customized training for companies.

"As you get into more advanced machines, there are fewer and fewer qualified workers to operate those machines," Newman said.

Newman said the increase in demand for machinists is tied to an aging machinist population — the average age is over 50 — and the fact that certain types of manufacturing have seen a resurgence in the U.S. in recent years, as more companies realize that the realities of manufacturing in China don't always make good business sense.

Front Range's efforts to fill this demand have not gone unnoticed. The new Advanced Technology Center was paid for by a $25 million U.S. Department of Labor grant to Colorado colleges to develop a pipeline of advanced manufacturing workers.

FRCC received $10 million of that $25 million and is using $4 million of that money to establish the Advanced Technology Center and ramp up its machining program. The remainder of Front Range's share will be used to manage the grant money and to help the other eight colleges — which split the other $15 million — to establish their own advanced manufacturing programs, spokesman John Feeley said.

"We are only doing machining," he said. "Some of the other schools are doing welding, engineering graphics, automation or 3D printing."

High demand for skilled machinists

The fact that five colleges — FRCC, Community College of Denver, Red Rocks Community College, Pikes Peak Community College and Pueblo Community College — are using at least some of the grant money to launch machining programs demonstrates just how acute the demand for qualified workers is.

"The median age (of machining students) is probably 30 to 40," Newman said. "We've had students as young as 18 and we've had students as old as 62.

"Last term we had a 60-year-old former musician who went through the introductory and the intermediate (classes) and he's now working as a machinist."

A collection of manually operated mills and lathes that was purchased by Front Range helps lay a strong foundation for the entry level students to build on, Newman said.

"These are machines that are not used that heavily in production anymore," he said. "(Students) are going to learn feeds and speeds. They're going to learn about the characteristics of various metals, they're going to learn about precision.

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